Something odd seems to be happening; I'd appreciate "look here" suggestions. I suspect mmapped pages aren't being flushed but gawd alone knows why.
Situation: vmware2, with a "fake disk", files in the /external FS (/external/vmware1/nt1.*). FBSD-stable. Behaviour's been like this for quite some time (since around 4.3-release, I think) Symptoms: run vmware, launch NT in virtual machine, blah, blah. Suspend the virtual machine. Former behaviour went like this: reports "synchronising disk status" (or imilar) and flushes memory contents to disk. (Irritatingly, one time in 20, this still happens.) Behaviour these days: vmware suspends immediately, and exits normally. However, the contents of the nt1.* files _aren't_ flushed, and stay unflushed for an open-ended period of time (days, weeks). sync(2)s don't make any change on this; umounting the FS will take several minutes as the contents are flushed to disk. fsyncing the appropriate files causes them to be flushed. Shouldn't the file contents be getting written back out within some finite time period? The system's not under tremendous load (it's a desktop workstn most of the time). Note: this doesn't result in ultimately broken behaviour, because those pages are eventually flushed on orderly shutdown. I'm just curious as to why sync(2) isn't forcing this. Cheers, jan -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ceci n'est pas une pipe | To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
